A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

The new Wolfenstein game is out and I was quite eager to try it out as soon as possible in Stereo 3D mode, but unfortunately the experience you get from this combination is quite disappointing. There is no profile for the game in Nvidia’s drivers and it does not handle Stereo 3D mode well by default… as you can see on the image above the objects in front are not only “doubled” as they should normally be so that when wearing thew glasses you’ll be having the perception of real depth. Instead of “doubled” the closer objects are actually quadrippled, meaning you get them double in each frame – double in the one for left eye and double in the one for right eye. You can easily see that by looking at the the blades of the plane’s motors. But looking more on the back you can also notice that the smoke at the end of the plane’s back is also rendered incorrectly and this is actually creating something like a weird glow around objects in the game. If you have tried Prototype immediately when it was available and before there was an official profile from Nvidia you probably saw a similar problem there that was later on fixed, when the official profile for 3D Vision was made available. And this gave me an interesting idea…

Renaming the single player executable Wolf2.exe to prototypef.exe (this is the name of the executable for the game Prototype) helped a bit, which is something I hoped for. It helped at leas to remove the problem with the smoke at the back of the plane (and other places where objects were rendered at incorrect depth), but did not resolve all the issues. The double x double rendering of the closer objects still remains, so that you cannot get good enough results, but still after playing a bit with the convergence you can at least lower the negative impact of that fact. Probably we are going to have to wait for an official profile for the game from Nvidia to get better results or maybe some update to the game, so if you don’t want to get disappointed you better wait a bit before getting Wolfenstein…

Something else that you should know in advance is that Wolfenstein only uses Direct3D mode for rendering in SinglePlayer mode (SP), but resorts to OpenGL for MultiPlayer mode (MP). This means that you can only play with 3D Vision in Stereo 3D when in SinglePlayer mode, but not in MultiPlayer… and in my opinion for playing in both for a bit the MP mode is more fun and interesting, even without S3D. ;)